Page 85 of Angel in Absentia
“Not yet,” Iris said. “You’ll think I’m mad.”
Me? Think you’re mad?Clea was so thrown off by the mere suggestion of it that she didn’t reply.
They both startled as a rift tore through the throne room and an ashen figure stumbled through it, followed by another. She recognized Dae, Ryson following after him.
Dae was coughing violently and completely black with soot. Ryson was covered just the same, his eyes brilliant against the darkness that stained his body and skin. With his presence came an outpouring of a harsh, cold layer of darkness that sent a biting chill under her skin and made the air around her crackle in protest.
“Dae!” Clea cried out, inspecting him as Dae thrashed back.
“I’ll alert the others!” Iris called and raced from the room.
“The city is indeed lost,” Ryson said, and Clea looked up from where she crouched. His face was cold, unreadable; the energy so often buried in his depths brimmed through the surface. She felt her fingers might freeze if she reached to touch him now.
“There are still people there,” Dae coughed roughly, barely able to speak. “He pulled me off the lines! Left them to die!” One of his eyes bled profusely, and a laceration across his chest swelled. “The lines are falling. Crushed. They’re crushed. There are more than Ashanas. Enemies came from all sides. Enemies on all sides. Not just the Ashanas.” He spoke in a way she’d never heard him speak, his voice almost overcome with a strange hysteria, his gaze intent but glazed over as if he were still trapped in the battle now, seeing monsters that had no presence here.
Ryson seemed completely disinterested in the accusation. He didn’t try and argue his point. His eyes moved to Clea.
She watched him questioningly. “More than just the Ashanas?”
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Clea straightened slowly, and Dae looked between them.
“You’re going?” Dae said. “No. You can’t go. You can’t leave me here. You can’t go and leave me here!”
Iris returned with water and several healers behind her.
“The city is done,” Ryson said again and looked at Clea solemnly. “I can give you ten minutes to save who you can on the lines Dae is referencing.” There was a strangeness to him, a reserve that made him seem foreign. He was directive and vacant, like the real version of him resided somewhere distant. She felt the edgesof his cien boiling beneath his skin, a steady but writhing power, a quiet river with a ripping current underneath.
Clea dropped her bag, and it made a loud thud on the ground. Shedding the weight, she prepared her hands. Ryson finding Dae gave her hope. Maybe Catagard, Idan, Merune, and any other Ruedain contacts were still there somewhere. At this point, she’d already feared they’d lost them all.
Ryson stepped aside, opening the black rift. Steeling herself, she took a breath and, against Dae’s protests, stepped through the portal.
†††
Heat, smoke, and death greeted her in a putrid wave that stole her breath. There were no traces of Ruedom, just miles of swollen, burning flesh and carnage. Beyond the wasteland, something moved before the firelit smoke, deep inside the city walls and far beyond what seemed to be the lines where Veilin had held their last defense.
She took in the horror of it all, thinking for a moment that the survivors Dae referenced were huddled in a mass near one wall, only to see them crushed, the bodies pressed down into the earth in a ghastly ensemble of limbs, like a spidery mass of blood and bone.
There were more horrors of similar caliber in every direction, people trapped in alternating poses of escape and battle. Finding survivors suddenly seemed to be an impossible task. Any hope she had of finding anyone she knew evaporated.
“Ten minutes,” Ryson reminded her, though when she turned, he wasn’t there. She tuned into her senses, pouring throughthe devastation where they remained in a forest of death and fire. She sprinted forward, following her senses to one victim and then another. Her mind became a focused scalpel, ignoring everything else; every horrible shape became blackness in the periphery.
“Here!” she shouted, patching up a mortal wound before Prince’s mask appeared. The portal opened next to it, and Prince delivered the body through it. She sprinted on, tracking signs of life through her senses. “Here!” she called, finding another, and then another. The seconds pounded on, and then when she sprinted toward one last person, a portal swallowed her whole. She staggered atop an elevated tower lost in a storm of wind and smoke. Prince’s mask hovered near another portal.
Clea looked for Ryson, but he was nowhere to be seen.
It’s time,Prince said.
“Where is Ryson? What’s about to happen?” she asked, heart pounding, skin and clothes covered in sweat.
She turned as an explosion echoed powerfully across the wasteland with a searing blast of cold and ice. She realized she was standing on a tower that had once been a portion of Ruedom’s walls. The air grew suddenly cold, the wind whipping with traces of snow blackened by cien, smoke, and ash.
Above her, the sky churned, a black hurricane rimmed with flickering veins of crimson light.
Prince’s mask looked red, reflecting the lights around them.
Our battle now begins, he said.I am afraid life will not survive it. You must return.
